Well, it’s been a crazy few weeks here in Southern California.  The building project at my library has had major changes to it’s plans–roughly one a week for the last four weeks; I hosted a conference and taught three classes; we spent a wild (for a middle-aged librarian) weekend in LA; and I moved 750,000 aerial photographs from Whittier to Santa Barbara.

To top it all off I got a present from my successor at Duck U:

During my final months in Eugene I, on behalf of WAML, found myself getting caught up in a bit of library drama.  Long story short: next thing I knew I was leaving behind 13 boxes as I decamped to Southern California and China.  UO did a great job organizing and compiling lists:  now it’s up to me to try and get these back to where they came from.

But first:  I’d love to scan them all.  My library is under a crunch to empty out for renovation–that most likely will mean not having the room to do lots of oversized scanning.  We also don’t have any sort of digital collection system capable of hosting the objects once they’re made.  Give us a couple years and we will, but right now it looks to be beyond what we have time and room and staff to do.  I’m open to suggestions on getting these done.

The strategy will be to contact the known victim libraries and see if they want to play.  Once I hear back, I’ll start circulating lists of what we have.  If a library says their’s is missing, I’ll be happy to mail it off.

I do remember there being some very interesting things in the envelopes, but this week we just needed to get the boxes off the truck the arrived on and opened up and sequenced.  This was made all the easier by the fact that it looks like they arrived in Santa Barbara in the exact same boxes as when they arrived in Eugene.  I recognize my handwriting.

I hope I never told anyone we’d be moving quickly on this.

What better to do on a brilliant, warm, sunny Sunday afternoon than to head to the Map Cave and see what the movers left behind?

I came seeking three flights that caught my eye as we were packing: C-4000 (Dust Bowl images), C-4650 (a huge multi-county California flight) and C-10660 (the Yangze River, 1946). I picked the two out-of-California flights because they just seem so darn interesting–and we’ll never get a commercial request for them, so I may as well investigate now while the memory is fresh. For C-4650, we have it in another format, so this gives me an excuse to examine some overlap between what was already here at UCSB and what just arrived.

Crazily: we already had the Yangze River flight! There’s no film for it, so I won’t get a chance to compare a scanned negative to a scanned print. I’m very curious about what might have happened to the film, because there are 3 distinct copies of many of the prints that were obviously made at different times (I can tell by the different types of paper used). And: there’s a bunch of little variation between the sets. Weird.

For C-4650, there are definitely new frames of imagery (the Whittier version covers 6 counties. Our existing is only 4). Figuring out how the sets relate is going to take a while to figure out.

The Dust Bowl imagery turns out to only be on nitrate film, so I won’t be able to examine it right now. Absence of paper prints makes me wonder if it was never printed (perhaps Sherman flew it as a spec flight and it never got bought) or if the prints went to a government agency and were considered state secrets.

One thing to remember from my work today: the Yangze River flight was sitting here on my shelf, but it wasn’t listed in our database at all. A careful run through all the C-flights is going to make the collection much better described.

In the end, there were 4 types of film.  What we believed to be one long run of nitrate actually switched to safety film–although there was one whole shelf that was mixed together, including three individual flights that contained mixed rolls of film.  I’m taking this as evidence that what the literature says is true:  it took most users a couple years to use up their existing film stock.  For Fairchild Aerial Surveys, the year was 1942.

A box of degraded nitrate film. Only a few pieces this far gone were found in the whole collection.

I know this because last week, an associate and I handled every single piece of film in the Fairchild collection at Whittier College as we packed it to move to UCSB.  162 boxes were shuttled to the UCLA Film & Television Archive in Santa Clarita, where they are being stored in lovely, single-pour, multiply-sing, chilled to 38 degrees nitrate vaults.  All of this film had been in hanging file folders, along with another 70 or so boxes’ worth of safety film.  There were also four big filing cabinets full of film just standing on its edge.  Labeled as ‘copy film,’ we believe that for many years Whittier had been copying the nitrate film to acetate and polyester safety films.  Unfortunately, they had been doing this for so long that a lot of the acetate film, about a third, had expired from vinegar syndrome.  (OH!  And as I’ve been writing this, there was a nice writeup about a facility similar the UCLA, also funded by David Packard.  Seems like nitrate film is on everyone’s mind these days.)

You’re going to be hearing a lot about vinegar syndrome for the next five years or so.  I have an existing problem with it on campus, and tens-of-thousands of images from Whittier will continue to degrade until, they too, expire.  Keep in mind:  expiring means I can’t decipher the information anymore.  While the University of Kentucky has scanned pictorial items with end-stage vinegar syndrome, for aerial photographs you would not be able to process the imagery into any sort of usable form once the emulsion ‘pops.’  So into the trash this film went.  A good chunk of this copy film duplicates prints made from the original camera negatives, and it’s my firm belief (and one that is easy to figure out through experimentation) that the prints will scan better than the copy film.  We just have to go through it all piece by piece figuring out where the best images are.

Preservation problems aside, it’s a giant, intact collection.  Completely analog.  There was a catalog database–I have a printout–but it got lost somewhere along the way.  There are spreadsheets of flight lists, but nothing says which flight is held on which of the four formats of film (and for the record, that’s nitrate camera film, acetate camera film, acetate and polyester copy film, and roll acetate and polyester film on rolls.  This is in addition to the 250,000 paper prints that, along with line indexes and mosaic prints, round out the collection.  The only frame-level access is through the mosaics and other index maps.

Yes, this collection fully documents the development of urban and industrial Southern California from 1927 to 1965, but this week we also identified a huge survey of the Dust Bowl, a 1946 mission over the Yangtze River, and Afghanistan during the 1950s.  It’s anyone’s guess what other goodies we’ll find as we integrate the collection into our own.  One thing is for sure:  while 99.99% of the collection is 9×9 airphotos (which are mostly pretty boring to look at, .01% is really interesting.  I got 2 cameras:

I knew after visiting for the first time that acquiring this collection was just the first step.  And as hard as we worked  packing, this is the easy and cheap part.  Converting the rapidly degrading materials to digital is low hanging fruit.  Long-term preservation of the information in a usable format is the hard part.

But first we’ve got to get it to Santa Barbara!  Today I watched a fantastic crew from S&M Movers place the collection onto 38 carts (to be exact, 36 carts and 2 speedpacks).  Tomorrow morning, two straight trucks (or a semi if the two little trucks turned out to be overweight) will arrive in Goleta.

Shrink-wrapped carts full of imagery.

But tonight, we needed to see something for ourselves, and for John Russell:

I already blasted this out on Twitter and Facebook, but today I can sit down and catch my breath and start describe how the Fairchild Aerial Surveys collection is winding up at UCSB.

(all photos in the post are clickable–I don’t want to deprive you all of my phone’s full resolution.)

On Wednesday of this week, I spent the day starting to organize the collection for its move.  Every time I have picked up collections in the past, it was always less than a carload (or two), so there was no need to get things in order in situ.  But the scale of the Fairchild Collection, some 750,000 images (as with all big photo collections, no one is really sure), dictates a different approach.  It’s a lot of photos.  Here’s how the room looked after about 2 hours of sorting:

If you look closely, you’ll see several large stacks of prints and negatives.  We’ll need to sort those out and refile them before the move.  There’s lots of evidence that a boss just walked in one day and sent everyone home.  A small pile of negatives were left sitting in the window, so they have expired (all the way to the bottom of the pile: 2 years in the sun will do that to a piece of photographic film kids–it’s light sensitive).  This DVD also got a little sun:

Let this be a lesson to you bosses:  if you’re going to lay someone off, either give them a chance to tidy up before you escort them out or have someone do it the next day.  But to tell you all the truth:  I learned this lesson about optical media the hard way myself back in Oregon (where I had a lovely view from my office window).

The room is literally like a time capsule.  There was a stack of items that look like they were out for duplication when the service closed.  I’m happy that the darkroom returned the stack of materials, but I wonder if they jobs were every delivered.  A whole bunch said ’super duper rush!’ on them.

All in all, everything I looked at in the room was intriguing:  a low-altitude oblique image from London in the 1940s; camera backs that still have film in them (oops. But really, am I going to send 5″ wide roll film to the chemist for processing?); a case full of DVDs that appear to have entire flights scanned.  And a few vintage pieces of Americana.

There is a lot more to tell, and I’ll do my best to keep the story up to date as we move the collection up here to Santa Barbara.  I really appreciate the support that I received from across campus and across the country for this acquisition.  The least I can do is tell you all about it.

update: I always leave out a crucial detail.  The first question this post generated was:  “What was the outcome?”  The answer is: It’s not resolved yet!  Whittier is considering the bids right now, and has promised an answer by next Wednesday, 8/22.

Over the past few months I have been working on a bid to acquire a big pile of aerial photographs of Southern California created between 1927 and 1965ish.  A small private college outside of LA did away with its geology department a number of years ago and their airphoto collection was closed to the public right about the time I moved to UC Surf Board in early 2010.  This was a super interesting experience because so far in my career people have simply called me up and said ‘we hear you collect old photos.  Please come collect ours.’  This is the first time I’ve ever seen a college or a government agency attempt to sell theirs, so I thought I would detail the process.

I have been quiet so far because, frankly, I didn’t want to run up the bidding.  But in the end I know that there is a big fat commercial bidder who has deep pockets who will probably offer the most money.  Our ‘final and best offers’ were due at 5pm, so there’s no danger of this blog post causing Google or some eccentric millionaire to sweep in at the last minute with a higher bid.  And if they did, so be it, but that would mean that Whittier (the heretofore undisclosed small college) didn’t follow its own bidding procedures.

So I know I most likely won’t have offered the most money.  But I did raise what I could and I received great support from my boss, who I believe offered as much money as this institution can in good conscience offer a private school.  After all, we’re not in the business of raising funds for others–we have a hard enough time raising money for ourselves.  I also convinced a couple people to write really nice notes in support of my bid.

My bid.  See:  it’s hard to separate my self from this.  It’s my collection.  I decide what we buy, what we keep, and what we throw away.  When I first started this blog I was at the complete bottom of the food chain, but 10 years post-MLS I have really internalized being a person who runs a map, data, and aerial photograph collection.  So, dear reader, you really have to take this story as my point of view and understand that it’s not at all neutral.  When I say that UCSB is the best place for these photographs…:

…what I’m really saying is that I am the best person to take care of them.

So in my (most likely not the highest) bid, I appealed to the public interest.  I talked about how I provide free scanning to students and researchers at all ten UC campuses. I talked about how Whittier didn’t pay any money for these images, but I didn’t chastise them for attempting to sell them.  And I spoke about what it will take (lots of time and not an insignificant amount of money) to get them from LA to Santa Barbara and how we will integrate them into our existing collections.  Finally:  I talked about the harm to the general public and to science if these images fall in to private hands.

And, before you get all high and mighty about how Jon frequently brags about the fact that he has a revenue stream in his library,  I told Whittier about how I charge a fee to the general public–that’s how I can afford to offer free scanning to students and researchers and buy $30,000 per year of preservation supplies and student labor.

The photographs that we are talking about have traded hands a couple times already, and legend has it that a UCLA professor rescued the bulk of the material in 1965 after Fairchild sold his business to Aero Services, Inc.  The web page that Whittier used to host says that three professors were given 24 hours to get the photos off of a loading dock in 1965.  Whittier bragged that it got the largest share, and in 1984 they received all of the vertical imagery that UCLA had initially taken.  That initial group of photos were divided between UCLA, CSU-Northridge, and Whittier College.  Whittier has credited professor Beach Leighton (who founded a company that likely was a frequent customer of the collection when it was at Whittier).  I wonder if Norman Thrower, who Stan Stevens thanks in this Catalog of Aerial Photos by Fairchild Aerial Surveys Inc Now in the Collections of the Department of Geography UCLA was another of the three? For that matter, who was the third?

My own library received a cache of photos in 1986 as a donation from Teledyne Geotronics, which is one of the successor corporations to Fairchild Aerial Surveys.  At some later date I think UCSB took in most of what was at CSU-Northridge.  We received similar gifts over the years from other companies who were going out of business and government agencies who were replacing older images with more recent ones.  This is how my collection here grew, just like the one at the University of Oregon where I used to work.

Private industry created these images, but I think that the wealth that is to be gotten out of them was earned by their creator.  Sherman Fairchild got very wealthy from his aerial survey company, and he went on to to make several more fortunes by becoming a founding father of silicon valley.  But you know how the Governor Romney and President Obama were sparring recently over whether or not people create their wealth from scratch?  Well, Fairchild was the son of a US congressman who was also a founder of IBM.  Fairchild Aerial Surveys as a business was created after Sherman won a contract to build a better aerial camera.  The wikipedia article says:  “Fairchild and his father went to Washington and won a government contract.”  He went on to found many more companies, many of which also received funding from the federal government.  At one point, a Fairchild company design a camera used aboard the Apollo moon missions.

I’ve got photos from that too.

Fairchild is widely credited with enabling aerial photography as a science with his high-speed between-the-lens shutter.  His efforts spawned an industry that continues today with companies like Pictometry and Sky Research who do everything from selling imagery to county tax assessors so that they can bust you for that un-permitted shed to detecting unexploded ordnance in order to protect civilians from the lingering effects of war.

So why am I telling you this?  Well, maybe it’s because the collection includes iconic locations, such as this view of Manhattan from 1931:

Lower Manhattan 1931. image: NYPL.

The archive gets deeper.  For example, there are construction photos of any number of famous landmarks, such as the George Washington Bridge:

Washington Bridge Approaches, New York. 1951. image: New Jersey State Archives

Most of the images at Whittier College are of a much more mundane quality:  they are vertical images (as opposed to the oblique views above) and cover a lot of ground that is not particularly interesting when taken by themselves.  The value of the imagery is in the comprehensive snapshop the collection would create, if it were to be combined with my own here at UCSB, of the development of Southern California.

So what’s the problem?  The problem is that Whittier college is selling the collection and has a strong financial incentive to accept the highest bid.  In this case, as I’ve said, the highest bid is likely going to come from a corporation who is going to lock the images up behind a big fat paywall. Where I am able to provide unlimited and cheap access to my collection, this corporation is going to add the content to its suite of services.

There’s two problems with this.  First, as I just wrote, the images will be just one piece of a big suite of services.  The market for historical aerial imagery (which is mainly to do environmental due diligence during real estate transactions) is tied up to all sorts of additional pieces of information (flood maps, city directories, title searching).  It’s not easy for anyone looking for old air photos to figure out where or how to get them.  Companies like EDR and the aforementioned Leighton Group probably don’t get many phone calls from property owners disputing a fence line.

Second, many of the researchers I deal with often don’t know that aerial photography will be useful until I tell them about it and show it to them.  If I have to tell them: ‘oh, you can contact this commercial firm to purchase items that we don’t have,’ they are going to lose interest pretty quickly.  Moreover, if I ask someone to come back tomorrow for something I need to retrieve from storage, a lot of the times they don’t come back.  You might think that this isn’t the way that science gets done, but quite often researchers follow the path of least resistance.

It’s my job to make sure there’s no resistance when they are looking for information.

It’s also my job to collect things, organize them so that they are usable, and then make them accessible to my end-users.  So while this post might be me personally advocating for something that will benefit me professionally, I think that’s ok.  This whole thing has been a learning experience, and one lesson that has been reinforced is that no one is ever going to complain about me advocating for public access to information.  I’m a librarian dammit.  It’s what I do.

Doing some recreational browsing / email catchup this weekend and just wanted to throw out some links and comments.  In the spirit of Jordan Jesse Go! I’ll give you some editorializing along the way.

Hang It Up!

Some technologies and projects are in need of serious work.  Others have outlived their usefulness and someone should turn out the lights.

• National Memory’s MrSid files and the map viewer interface
  The interpretive text and curation are lovely.  The maps stunning.  But the html 1 web interface and full-downloads available only as the archaic MrSID?  Boo!  Time to forward migrate some of this data Library of Congress.  Why make a web page in 2011 if you’re not going to improve the U/X?
• FactFinder 2
  Requires Firefox 3.2 or IE 7.  Note: not “at least”
  

  Sorry for the lame formatting. Screenshots from wikipedia today.

  

• Globetrotter
  Yeah: this one’s mine.  Well, at least I inherited it.  And much like a moose head or the steamer-trunk your great-grandfather carried with him from Poland, Globetrotter is no longer a usable tool.  It’s an artifact: the last public and operating piece of the Alexandria Digital Library.  I’m working on it.

Keep it up!

• National Memory: at least you can download full resolution versions of all the images!  You’re still the granddaddy of them all and no matter how dowdy your dark and musty corners are, at least I know where to find you.  Besides:  where else would I go look for a Battle of Bull Run map?
• National Library of Scotland
  And their ExpressView interface.  I think these are still MrSID’s, but with an html 5 interface?  And then there’s the seamless mosaic Google Maps version of the 1/2″ = 1 mile maps.  With transparency slider!  That’s hot.
• Klokan geo-developer and OS software projects
  My new favorite geoBlog.  The parent company has a clear set of services–if only I knew how much this stuff costs.  Anybody done business with these folks? (you know, other than you, National Library of Scotland.)
• 2010 “American Indians and Alaska Natives in the United States.”
  Is this the longest running Census sheet map?  I think there is one for every census.  This year’s introduces a new labeling scheme (maybe someone got the Maplex engine for their birthday?).  The only way to make this map better?  Show what’s new since the previous census.
• Chris Thiry over at the Colorado School of Mines shares his index maps not just as downloadable KMZs, not just as zipped up shapefiles, but also live at arcGISonline.

Why bring all this up now?  Because I’m doing a lot of looking.  More and more people are asking what is coming down the road, and the ability of any individual cartographer or librarian making a compelling web object is increasing (I’m looking at you Chris Thiry).  When a whole institution decides to put muscle behind online projects (I’m looking at you Scotland), it’s more likely to succeed.  While a lot of these sorts of projects are built on standard digital collections engines, quite a few of them were custom built in the 1990s and were never intended to last as long as they have.  It’s like I’ve got the Spirit and Opportunity of digital libraries.  Groundbreaking for the time, but everyone wants to take Curiosity to the prom.

And before anyone complains:  keep in mind I left the strongest words for myself and I tease you because I love you.  And in the end, please remember that deep down I’m just a 12-year-old boy and I’m doing it for the lulz.